make her Lady Falconnet. Moreover, he was with her day by day; and you
may mark this as you will; that a present suitor hath ever the trump
cards to play against the absent lover.

So, brooding over this, I wore out two most dismal days--the first in
many I had had to pass alone. But on the morning of the third the sky
was lightened, though then the light was but a flash and darkness
followed quickly after. She came again and brought me a visitor; it was
this same Father Matthieu with whom she had jestingly compared me, and
lest I should take my punishment too lightly, stayed but to make the
good priest known to me.

Now I was born and bred an heretic, by any papist's reckoning, but I
have ever held it witless in that man who lets a creed obstruct a
friendship. Moreover, this sweet-faced cleric was the friendliest of
men; friendly, and yet the wiliest Jesuit of them all, since he read me
at a glance and fell straightway to praising Margery.

"A truly sweet young demoiselle," he said, by way of foreword, no sooner
was the door closed behind her, and while he preached a sermon on this
text I grew to know and love him.

He was a little man, as bone and muscle go, with deep-set eyes, and
features kind and mild and fine as any woman's; some such face as
Leonardo gave St. John, could that have been less youthful. I could not
tell his order, though from his well-worn cassock girded at the waist
with a frayed bit of hempen cord he might have been a Little Brother of
the Poor. But this I noted; that he was not tonsured, and his white
hair, soft and fine as Margery's, was like an aureole to the finely
chiseled features. As missionary men of any creed are apt, he looked far
older than he really was; and when he came to tell me of his life among
the Indians, it was patent how the years had multiplied upon him.

I listened, well enough content to learn him better by his own report.

"But you must find it thankless work; this gospeling in the wilderness,"
I ventured, when all was said. "'Tis but a hermit's life for any man of
parts; and after all, when you have done your utmost, your converts are
but savages, as they were."

At this he smiled and shook his head. _"Non, Monsieur_, not so. You are
a soldier and can not see beyond your point of sword. _Mais, mon ami_,
they have souls to save, these poor children of the forest, and they are
far more sinned against than sinning. I find them kind and true and
faithful; and some of